How can I extract still frames from an MPEG video if Photoshop won't open it?

Question

I have a high-quality MPEG video and want to pull out one or more still frames for editing in Photoshop. When I try to open the file directly, Photoshop shows an error saying the video file could not be opened.

I understand Photoshop can open some formats like MP4 or M4V, but not this MPEG file. Is there a workaround that lets me extract frames without unnecessarily recompressing the video?

user1943 · Answer

You can use ffmpeg, a cross-platform command-line tool, to extract the frames you want as PNG files, which you can then open in Photoshop.

From the documention, there are several approaches you can take. One would be to open a console (the ffmpeg executable must be in your PATH) and run the command:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:00:14.435 -vframes 1 out.png

Where input.mp4 is the filename for the video you want to extract from, and 00:00:14.435 identifies the time of the frame you want to extract.

Or, you could extract all frames this way:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -f image2 input.mp4_fr%7d.png

Where %7d will number each frame using 7 digits, padding the front of the number with zeros as necessary.

How can I extract still frames from an MPEG video if Photoshop won't open it?

2 Answers

Your Answer

Related Questions